Sermon preached at Redeemer Lutheran, Boise for the Installation of Rev. Mariah Mills, called to serve as pastor of Redeemer and Grace Lutheran, Horseshoe Bend.

Exodus 3:1-13

3Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness, and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. ²There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. ³Then Moses said, ‘I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up.’ ⁴When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ ⁵Then he said, ‘Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ ⁶He said further, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.

7 Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, ⁸and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey, to the country of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. ⁹The cry of the Israelites has now come to me; I have also seen how the Egyptians oppress them. ¹⁰So come, I will send you to Pharaoh to bring my people, the Israelites, out of Egypt.’ ¹¹But Moses said to God, ‘Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?’ ¹²He said, ‘I will be with you; and this shall be the sign for you that it is I who sent you: when you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall worship God on this mountain.’

13 But Moses said to God, ‘If I come to the Israelites and say to them, “The God of your ancestors has sent me to you”, and they ask me, “What is his name?” what shall I say to them?’

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

12Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. ²You know that when you were pagans, you were enticed and led astray to idols that could not speak. ³Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says ‘Let Jesus be cursed!’ and no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit.

4 Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; ⁵and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; ⁶and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone.⁷To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.⁸To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, ⁹to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, ¹⁰to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. ¹¹All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

Matthew 14:13-21

13 Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. ¹⁴When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. ¹⁵When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, ‘This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.’ ¹⁶Jesus said to them, ‘They need not go away; you give them something to eat.’ ¹⁷They replied, ‘We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.’ ¹⁸And he said, ‘Bring them here to me.’ ¹⁹Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. ²⁰And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full.²¹And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.

Meggan Manlove – Sermon

“We are stronger together,” a new colleague of mine is fond of saying. I am learning what that feels like and looks like around our synod, but I know it to be true already in the Treasure Valley of Idaho. Congregations have been praying for Redeemer and Grace for some time, and now today we celebrate that you have a new pastor. Hooray! But I also want to say hooray to all of you for your waiting.

The story of Moses and the burning bush has been portrayed by artists for centuries. It’s a story that grabs the imagination—the bush that blazes but is not consumed, the command to take off shoes because Moses is standing on holy ground, and the call—the call to the person unprepared and unwilling that reminds us of so many other call stories in scripture. I love this story too. I love that Moses is paying attention and notices the bush. I love the dialogue between Moses and God—God’s naming the people’s suffering, Moses’ questioning, God’s assurance. There are components of this story that are at once relatable and others that are other worldly.

But this week I was mostly struck by how the passage begins and by what precedes it. “Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro.” This story is preceded by Moses witnessing an Egyptian beating Moses’ kinfolk; Moses killing said Egyptian; Moses then fleeing from Eyptian Pharaoh. Moses flees to the land of Midian where he meets Jethro, marries Ziporah, and has a son. Then we read in chapter two, “after a long time the king of Egypt died.” In other words, it was not a matter of mere weeks or days between Moses fleeing Egypt and encountering the burning bush. It was a long time.

Moses waited for God. So did the Israelites. In a day an age where I can instantaneously look up news happening not just in my city but on the other side of the globe, this waiting can also seem otherworldly. It is not just that our culture is transactional, and so we slip into making our relationship with God transactional, it is also that we expect things now. Nothing encourages or affirms patient waiting.

Redeemer and Grace, you waited, either comfortably or impatiently and uncomfortably. You prayed. You stayed in relationship with God. You continued to build relationships with one another and your neighbors, first in the middle of a global pandemic and then coming out of the pandemic. I want to say that I saw your faithful waiting. I don’t know how you will look back on that time in a year or two, but I hope you see that that practice in waiting prepared you to notice, to pause and turn your head as Moses did, to notice the future pastor God was preparing for this call.

My assumption is that something else happened in that waiting. A variety of gifts from among you were lifted up in new ways, which brings us to First Corinthians. It is helpful to remember that Paul’s letter to Corinth is primarily about the common needs of the Christian community. Here is one criticism Paul lodges against the Corinthian congregation: their inability to live out the essential claim of a community founded in the Gospel of Jesus. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus unite every congregation of followers. Unity is for the sake of God’s mission in the world and for the building up of that particular community.

For Paul, spirituality involves the ongoing reality and work of the Holy Spirit in the lives of Jesus’ followers. The problem in Corinth is that some spiritual elitists have really messed this up. They have regarded their gifts of the Spirit as making them superior to other members of the Community. Paul emphasizes unified divine action. This empowers diverse human activity for the common good—the benefit of everyone. 

For me, the pairing of the Feeding of the Multitude and the Corinthian passage on Spiritual Gifts is a great one. God’s abundance of bread and fish, the 12 baskets of leftovers, becomes accessible to all communities. God has also given us an abundance of spiritual gifts, enough to build life-giving communities wherever we are. 

Paul also is adamant that the gifts come from the Spirit, not from us. Sometimes, even when we have a called pastor leading us, we still must wait to see or hear how the Spirit will use all of those gifts. We must do that active waiting we are talk so much about during Advent, but which we are called to each day.

Paul would further contend that the Spirit does not promote excessive individualism or elitism because those do not benefit the common good. One pastor wrote, “Spiritual gifts are not for us, and therefore it is essential that we discern them and use them. Spiritual gifts are given by the Holy Spirit, they are a way that the Holy Spirit flows through us into the world that God loves. By exercising our gifts, we put ourselves at the disposal of the Great Almighty to be used as God wishes. Nothing could be more humbling. And God will use you. In fact, this is how God has designed us, with the capacity to know and love God and with unique gifts that God uses to bless the world….” 

Know that you Mariah and you Redeemer Lutheran and Grace Lutheran are not alone as you live out your baptismal call. The body of Christ is a body. We are truly church together. None of us can do this work alone. And we are the body of Christ accompanied by the Holy Spirit. As each of you disciples continues to take one faithful step forward, know that the Spirit is always with you, in the bread and wine, in our shared worship, and in your daily lives. Thanks be to God.